Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems

by Martín Espada

Overview

Award-winning poet Martín Espada gives voice to the spirit of endurance in the face of loss.

In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353952
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer finalist The Republic of Poetry. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 13

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913

I The Red Flag 19

II The River Floods the Avenue 20

III The Insects in the Soup 21

IV The Little Agitator 22

V Vivas to Those Who Have Failed 23

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate 27

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World 29

How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way 31

Chalkboard on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning After George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager 33

Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire 34

Here I Am

Here I Am 39

Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues 41

Once Thundering Penguin Herds Darkened the Prairie 43

Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio 45

The Socialist in the Crowd 47

From the Rubáiyát of Fenway Park 49

Hard-Handed Men of Athens 50

Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treat Machu Picchu 53

The Man in the Duck Suit 56

A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body

Flowers and Bullets 59

A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body 60

The Discovery of Archaeopteryx 62

Of the Threads That Connect the Stars 64

The Goddamned Crucifix 65

El Moriviví

Haunt Me 69

The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch 71

On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals 72

Bills to Pay 74

After the Goose That Rose Like the God of Geese 75

Mad Lave 76

The Sinking of the San Jacinto 78

There But Not There 80

The Shamrock 82

El Moriviví 84

Notes on the Poems 88

Editorial Reviews

"A poet with a remarkable vision."

NBC Latino

"In his tenderly elegiac, yet fierce collection…Espada’s poems continue to define the role of the poet as an emotional historian. Like Whitman, Espada stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness and connectedness."

Richard Blanco

"“[Espada] writes as if we don’t have that much time left."

Washington Independent Review of Books

"In the battle against forgetfulness, in the ongoing war against dumb distraction and voluntary blindness, Martín Espada is our Subcomandante. With an ear sweetened by long listening to voices most often unheard, he writes poems that resonate like bells forged of bronze and blood."

Tim Seibles

"This poet’s work breathes life into those who failed—the downtrodden, the forgotten, and the dead—so that their voices may speak to us now….Espada’s poems act as a salve for today’s violence, just as Whitman’s poems dress the wounds of the Civil War."

The Rumpus

"Showcases some of Martín Espada’s most powerful writing in years."

Washington Post

"Memorable, vital, heart-stopping poems. Eloquent in his celebration of those whose names and faces are ‘rubbed off / by oblivion’s thumb like a Roman coin,’ laureate of ballparks and boxing rings, mad love and workers’ strikes, moving elegist… Martín Espada is an essentially American poet and true son of Walt Whitman."

Alicia Ostriker

"Espada at his brilliant best, the poet laureate of our New America, with a voice that breaks heart, gives courage and burns all illusions."

Junot Díaz

"Martín Espada is one of the few poets in our time who really matters, because his words matter, and the people and the world he writes about matter. One thinks of Neruda, of Whitman, of Philip Levine as one finds oneself caught up by the magic of Espada’s voice."

Paul Mariani

"In a passionate collection that is socially conscious and personal, ecstatic and elegiac all at once, Martin Espada’s collection of poems Vivas to Those Who Have Failed should be read again and again, silently and aloud, in sadness and celebration of those who have fought throughout history and refuse to be forgotten."

Massachusetts Review